Gary James – författare

This study of Manchester football, by leading football historian Gary James, considers the sport’s emergence, development and establishment through to its position as the city’s leading team sport. The period from 1840 to 1919 saw football in Manchester develop from an inconsequential, occasionally outlawed activity, into a major business with a variety of popular football clubs and supporting industry. This book makes a distinct and original contribution to the historiography of sport. It is the first academic study into the development of association football in Manchester, and is directly linked to the current state of knowledge and debates within sports history on football’s origins. It adds regional focus to inform the wider debate, contextualising the growth of the sport in the city and identifies communities who propagated and developed football. Robust research should ensure that this becomes the benchmark study of regional football.

This book brings together a range of researchers to explore the growth and development of the women’s game in Britain and Ireland. They are active across a diverse range of fields, from historians and heritage practitioners, to those from the arts such as playwrights and documentary directors. This edited collection draws together both regional and national studies to provide a more nuanced understanding of the history of the women’s game in Britain and Ireland than has been possible before. Chapters in this book explore new findings around the development of key teams, players, and organisations, and in doing so enrich the historiography of the game.Often books on the history of football have taken a narrative approach focusing only on the research findings or ‘story’. This is of course important, but in this book the editors also wanted to reflect the ways in which research into the history of women’s football has been shared and explored within a range of spaces and communities. There is a huge untapped audience who want to engage with the history of the sport. By reflecting on previous arts/heritage-based projects we can explore new avenues regarding how academic research can be made accessible to the general public and in turn how arts/ heritage-based projects can inform academic research.